Regional pin up girls, Triple-A baseball teams, the cast of Welcome Back Kotter, they're all enshrined on soda cans! Remember Classic Coke? Mello Yellow ring a bell-oh? The ill-fated Apple Slice? Welcome to the World of Tom Bates, packrat and pop cultural historian, he took his hobby to a new plateau. Tom has been dragging home cans since age 13. His adolescent dumpster dives yielded a wall of cans that nearly killed the family cat.

After that mishap the collection was moved into a trailer in his back yard. But Tom's collection festered beyond those walls and in 1986, the Museum of Beverage Containers was born.

The beauty of certain objects diminishes with quantity. Take the human ass. A nice one is always a sight for sore eyes, but looking at twenty and you lose all perspective. It's no longer sexy or sightly, just hauntingly robotic. Fortunately, the opposite is true with soda cans. One is garbage thousands are glorious! Unlike beer, soda cans have historically been bright, fun colors. Maybe because alcohol is a depressant or that beer doesn't need to convince anyone of anything. I'll leave this to the slaves of Madison Avenue.

David and I were the only visitors and the resulting quiet, fluorescent lighting, and aisles of stacked cans made it feel like an aluminum library. Over 36,000 different soda cans and 9000 beer cans. The Museum of Beverage Containers, though lacking a penny smasher, is worth the three dollars! Visit the Museum online here.

time for some inspiration